The handstand is your nightmare
HANDSTAND. I’ve seen people don’t make any progress for years, struggling to find the balance every time they attempt to do it , fall , fall , and fall again .
If you are lucky you are just wasting your time : minutes , hours, thinking you are progressing because one day you can hold an handstand for like 5 seconds .
But ops…
You left the camera off , you can’t share it on instagram , let’s try next time ! And then in the following session you can’t even hold 1 second and it looks like you did 1 step forward and 3 backward , and you realize the the last session you were just lucky .
How many repetition you need to master a movement, more precisely an advanced movement like the handstand? Do you know it ? well i will not tell you the number because i don’t wanna shatter your dream , but it’s A LOT !
Oh! I almost forgot … a lot of TECNICALLY GOOD repetitions ! which means that every time you do your reps thay have to be with a good form .
Why?
Well because your brain is like a sponge , it absorb everything. The goods and the bads .
This means that when you are doing your free attempt and you fall because you don’t have a good alignment and good activations, your brain will learn how to fall and how to NOT have a good alignment and good activations.
Now, the problem is that to fix one single bad repetition of an advanced movement ( like the handstand) it takes maaany good repetitions . Multiply this for , i don’t know 1000 bad attempts , and i think you will agree with me that this thing could take forever.
So what is the secret ?
No secret my friends…
NO
SECRETS!
Be patient and progress step by step .
Something that not many tells you is that when you train for handstand , there are not many way to achieve it. You need to follow certain steps and making some adaptations depending on specific situation, that , 99% of the times are affected by your structure.
Let’s make an example.
You’ve been working in an office for 30 years , and sitting all this time it caused your back to be curved (kyphosis) , which in turn is going to affect your scapula thoracic and scapulo humeral mobility.
How do you expect to have a good alignment with this problem ? you don’t, this is why the FIRST STEP in handstand training should be making an analysis of the phisycal structure of each individuals .
Than you can start working on yout mobility , and in the meantime overcome your fear to fall with practicing with the headstand or the shoulders stand.
Once your mobility get better, you need to “break down” the handstand into pieces , so that you can focus on exercises that help you understand the proper muscles activations( hips activation , shoulder activation etc..) and how to align the various segment of your body .
And once you get how to activate the right muscles , you can put those pieces togheter .
But watch out .
Don’t do any free handstand attempt yet, instead start using the wall ( especially belly to wall ) to understand what the proper alignement among ALL the segment of your body should be .
Finally the hardest part of the game …
The transition from wall handstand and free handstand , which require not only balance but also coordination.
But this is another story…
